well-gleaned, well-trodden field of mere
verbal linoruistics, but a new field in Celtic
philology, of what may be called Rudimen-
tary Sentence-building; a field whereon,
as it appears to me, may be investigated
the earliest attempts at the process by
which the pattern of human thought —
ethical, social, and religious — is first rudely
shaped out to the mind's eye of hearer or
reader, and in some measure to the speaker's
own clearer consciousness, by the warp and
woof of woven words. On this field, I
believe, it is that the Gaelic language will
prove most truly interesting in itself, and
most largely helpful to the student of
philology. For that language, with all the
elasticity of a living, plastic organism, ex-
hibits a wondrous wealth of such rudely
elementary expedients, for expressing gram-
matical relations, as may well be taken for
Nature's earliest Qrerminal efforts at word-
weaving into the significant pattern of
intelligible statement or proposition. The
form of these rude linguistic contrivances
still used in Gaelic is infinitely various.